‘Perhaps there is something admirable in the straightforward way the monkey goes about its business.’
Photograph: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

The obvious answer is the traffic pile-ups. But we’ll get on to that later.

Try to imagine being a member of the Beatles at the height of their fame, at the top of their game. Imagine how it must have felt, being the recipient of that unconditional admiration; being able to sing lyrics like ‘“Semolina pilchards / Climbing up the Eiffel Tower / Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna” and, rather than being quietly escorted out of the building, having hordes of young women faint with arousal. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

Monkeys don’t, on the whole, wear clothes. This is one of several reasons why I myself am not sexually attracted to them

In 1968, the world at their feet, the Quality Quartet released their White Album, officially titled “The Beatles”. Such was Paul McCartney’s unwavering self-belief at the time, that the following sequence of events was considered perfectly acceptable: watching two monkeys have a quickie in the street in India; making a note to himself that humans don’t, on the whole, tend to do that; and then writing and recording a song in which he asks 15 times why that’s the case, intermittently following the question with “Ooh”.

As McCartney explained when – understandably – interviewers wondered why anyone would ever write a song like that, perhaps there is something admirable in the straightforward way the monkey goes about its business. “That’s how simple the act of procreation is, that bloody monkey hopping on and hopping off,” he said. “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road? could have applied to either fucking or shitting, to put it roughly. Why don’t we do either of them in the road?”

Had someone failed to give him a satisfactory reason as to why both of those things were unacceptable, McCartney would presumably have cut a rather different figure in his old age, breathlessly making love and openly defecating on the M4. But we only have time to tackle the first of McCartney’s two gripes here, and it’s an important one: why aren’t more of us enthusiastically banging in the street?

Monkeys don’t, on the whole, wear clothes. There are hilarious exceptions, sure, but by and large this is one of the many forks in the road where we diverge from our hairy cousins. When humans invented self-consciousness and clothes, we sacrificed our ability to simply whip it out and get it on. All of a sudden there were layers. Nudity was a novelty. Ankles became exotic. With clothes came a litany of social niceties, all of which – even if this was not the intention – made sex an adventure, a voyage of discovery. This is one of several reasons why I myself am not sexually attracted to monkeys. It’s all on display. There’s no mystery. Pop some stockings on a macaque and maybe we can talk.

One of the crucial things McCartney overlooked was that we have these things called bedrooms. So we could try doing it in the road, but one of the most appealing traits of bedrooms is that Eddie Stobart lorries don’t tend to be driving straight through them, honking and spraying grit all over your snoring naked body. I’d wager that, if you paused McCartney in the middle of a bout of lovemaking and asked whether he would rather be working his magic on cotton sheets or Swindon’s Magic Roundabout, he’d say the former, every time, before insisting that you leave. In other words, even he wouldn’t follow his advice.

The final nail in the coffin of what I will call McCartney’s Theory of Depravity is consideration of others – a foreign concept to a randy monkey. Famously, car crashes become a morbid sideshow on motorways, distracting and delaying drivers as they pass by. Imagine how your journey would be affected if, halfway through your trip to Grandma’s for Sunday lunch, you had to swerve in order to avoid two exhibitionists buttering the biscuit on the hard shoulder.

Yes, that kind of behaviour might become the norm. But who wants that norm? I put it to you that not even McCartney wants that norm. Grant yourself the freedom to do it in the road and you must grant the same freedom to your worst and ugliest enemy. Curtains are your friends. Never forget that.

I say it to McCartney and I say it to you the reader: do it in the road and take your life into your own hands if you wish. But when you’re shivering uncontrollably, you’ve caused a traffic snarl-up two miles long, and your knees and buttocks are studded with gravel, don’t come crying to me. If it’s a choice between the sheets and the streets, I’ll take the sheets any day of the week.